Storage system always is a critical part of a computing system regardless of the computing system is a server, a laptop or desktop computer, or a wireless device such as cell phone or personal data assistant device (“PDA”). The storage system can be categorized as internal storage or external storage system.
The internal storages of a computing system include those storage media such as hard disk drives, memory sticks, and memory etc. that are internally connected in the computing system directly through system bus or a few inches of cable, Therefore, the storage media actually are internal components of the computing system in a same enclosure.
The external storage of a computing system are those storage media that are not the internal components of the computing system in a same enclosure. Therefore, the storage media have to be accessed through longer cable, such as through Ethernet controller with longer cable for IP based storage, Fiber channel cable for fiber channel storage, or wireless communication media etc. The storage media of the external storage could be magnetic hard disk drives, solid state disk, optical storage drives, memory card, etc. and could be in any form such as Raid which usually consists of a group of hard disk drives.
To effectively use a storage system, the storage devices of the storage system usually need to be partitioned with storage volumes. After the partition, each of the volumes can be used for establishing a file system on top of it. To simplify the discussion, herein, the term of the storage volume and its corresponding file system, and the storage partition are often used without differentiation.
To satisfy the needs for external storage for a larger number of wireless devices on the Internet, a central controlled distributed scalable virtual machine (“CCDSVM”) of present invention can be deployed. The CCDSVM allows a control management system to control a group of computing systems for providing distributed services, including storage service, to client systems over the Internet, Intranet, and LAN environment.
As matter of the fact, today major Internet service provider (ISP) and application service provider (ASP) are all in business of providing various type of storage services to their clients.
Unless specified, the programming languages and the protocols used by the software modules and the computing systems used of present invention are assumed to be the same as described in the prior patent applications.
In addition, in the drawing, like elements are designated by like reference numbers. Further, when a list of identical elements is present, only one element will be given the reference number.